ably a traditional Aryan law of nuptial etiquette, l'usage du pays,
once prevalent among the people of India.

If our view be correct, then several rules of etiquette, and not one
alone, will be illustrated in the stories which we suppose the rules to
have suggested. In the case of Urvasi and Pururavas, the rule was, not
to see the husband naked. In 'Cupid and Psyche,' the husband was not to
be looked upon at all. In the well-known myth of Melusine, the bride is
not to be seen naked. Melusine tells her lover that she will only abide
with him dum ipsam nudam non viderit. {76a} The same taboo occurs in a
Dutch Marchen. {76b}

We have now to examine a singular form of the myth, in which the strange
bride is not a fairy, or spiritual being, but an animal. In this class
of story the husband is usually forbidden to perform some act which will
recall to the bride the associations of her old animal existence. The
converse of the tale is the well-known legend of the Forsaken Merman. The
king of the sea permits his human wife to go to church. The ancient
sacred associations are revived, and the woman returns no more.

She will not come though you call all day
Come away, come away.

Now, in the tales of the animal bride, it is her associations with her
former life among the beasts that are not to be revived, and when they
are reawakened by the commission of some act which she has forbidden, or
the neglect of some precaution which she has enjoined, she, like Urvasi,
disappears.

* * * * *

The best known example of this variant of the tale is the story of Bheki,
in Sanskrit. Mr. Max Muller has interpreted the myth in accordance with
his own method. {77} His difficulty is to account for the belief that a
king might marry a frog. Our ancestors, he remarks, 'were not idiots,'
how then could they tell such a story? We might reply that our
ancestors, if we go far enough back, were savages, and that such stories
are the staple of savage myth. Mr. Muller, however, holds that an
accidental corruption of language reduced Aryan fancy to the savage
level. He explains the corruption thus: 'We find, in Sanskrit, that
Bheki, the frog, was a beautiful girl, and that one day, when sitting
near a well, she was discovered by a king, who asked her to be his wife.
She consented, _on condition that he should never show her a drop of
water_. One day, being tired, she asked the king for water; the king
forgot his promise, bro